Partners: Part Three

Part Two of this story appeared yesterday. In this concluding chapter, Chelsea finds a most unlikely hero.

            Chelsea had long fantasized about the day she’d leave Winterstone’s frosty employ. Oh, the upbraiding she’d give him in her exit interview! Afterward, she’d hop the evening flight to Maui, where she’d spend two weeks on the beach sweating out all his poison.

Her wildest imaginings involved her knocking out company security cameras and luring into the man’s suite a rhinoceros from the Los Angeles Zoo. She’d bolt his doors, disable his phones and then simply listen to how the two got on.

            But long before she’d quit or Winterstone would be tossed about his enclosure by a giant horned beast, Chelsea assumed the man would simply just leave. She’d been waiting for years for news of his being tapped to handle black ops for a crooked president or plucked for a leadership role at the Fed. A psychotic break wasn’t even on her list.

            The hyenas in these corner offices will eat him alive, she thought to herself, surprised at feeling a little sad for the devil. He was clearly in a state. She’d always suspected that on some level – microscopic or perhaps philosophical – Winterstone was probably human. If she could help, the assistants’ code held, she should. Chelsea surprised herself once more by standing. She smoothed her skirt and cleared her throat.

            “Rough weekend, sir?” she said.

            “It’s too much!” the man wailed, suddenly bursting into tears. “Too great a burden.”

            Ah, Chelsea thought, so it was cancer. Inoperable. Or maybe another wife was dragging him into divorce court. Costly, even for him, a man with yachts on both seaboards. Either way, Chelsea felt oddly warmed by the situation. This was the most the two had spoken in years.

            “May I lend you a hand?” she said.

            “Have you eyes, secretary? Gaze upon me.”

            The man had a calculator taped to the top of his mask.

            “The skies have reached down to touch me, bestowing upon me a wondrous and terrible power,” he continued. “Behold.” He held out a hand that looked as though it had been singed by fire. “Give me a hundred.”

            “A 100-dollar bill?”

            He looked at her, standing before him in her Jaclyn Smith ensemble. “Ah, right,” he said. “A quarter, then. Whatever you have on your person.”

            Chelsea ran to her cubicle. By now, her crisis management team leader would be just down the hall. She poked her head out to look in the direction of his office. Then she turned to look again at her boss, the giant Gherkin, sitting with his arm still outstretched upon the desk. A thin plume of smoke rose steadily from his head.

She ducked back in the cubicle to grab her purse. She yanked out her pocketbook, which held only her cards and the picture of Kirstie Alley she’d cut from People to encourage herself to eat more healthily. She turned her bag upside and shook it.

            In his suite, Winterstone banged his arm upon the desk.

            Chelsea flung open a drawer and found a nickel.

            Winterstone took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he closed his charred fingers over the coin.

            “2.2 Indian rupees,” he murmured.

            “Sir  – ”

“.34 Chinese yuans. 3.67 Algerian dinars,” he continued. The sums spilled out of him in rapid-fire succession. “.068 Brunei dollars.”

            Spent, he collapsed onto the desk. “Great heaven help me,” he moaned, “for this is the awesome gift I have been given. Place any currency in my grasp and I can tell you its worth that second in Rangoon, New York, London or Borneo. This world is forever changed. I have been made god!”

            Chelsea stared at the man, brow furrowed, before making an elaborate examination of her nails.

“If that’s all, sir,” she said.

            “All? My darling girl, I reveal to you a power unprecedented! I shall reshape the world.”

            “It’s just that you kind of had me set up for … I was expecting something … I don’t know what I was thinking.”

            “Yes, well, I’m sure you can understand how important it is that the details of my personal life remain hidden from humanity. The people cannot know my true identity.”

            “Your secret’s safe with me,” she said. She pantomimed locking her lips and tossing away the key.

            “Another thing.”

            “Yes.”

            “Calculo.”

            “I believe you’ve stapled it to your head, sir.”

            “Chelsea,” Winterstone said importantly, “I am Calculo.”

            “You know my name,” she said, flabbergasted. “You actually called me by my name.”

            “Forgive me – my former self – for not using it more often. It’s priceless,” he said. “A Chelsea bun is a type of cake, you might be interested to know. It’s formed in the shape of a spiral and made of a yeast dough with a sweet glaze. I should have sent you out to purchase one for yourself as a birthday gift from me.”

            Chelsea felt the room beginning to spin.

            “Your worth is beyond measure, my spirited girl. Never doubt that. Inestimable is the value of your soul.”

            She began slowly backpedaling. “I’ll just,” she said, “close these doors, sir, to give you a little privacy.”

             “But your nickel.”

            “Keep it,” she said, before shutting him inside.

            Chelsea walked slowly back to her desk. She scrubbed all Winterstone’s meetings for the week. Then she looked up the extension of her human resources specialist. Just like that, she realized, she was free.

Come the noon hour, though, Chelsea was still on the job. She brought Winterstone a sensible meal of salad and SmartWater. She remained behind after delivering the food to help the hero wrestle with his mask, the mouth and eye openings of which were so small that only every third forkful was reaching his lips. Chelsea caught the dressing that had dripped onto his cat suit but left the croutons that had collected in his verdine lap.

            “What happened out there on the sea? You were in that boat race, weren’t you?” she asked.

            “It was the most astounding thing,” Winterstone began. But just then, the device atop his head blinked into life. Chelsea gave a start.

            He stopped chewing. “What is it?”

            “Your, um, thing.” She pointed to his crown.

            He put down his fork. “Holy God. What does it say?”

            “It says BOOBS, sir.”

            “You’re looking at it upside down. You mean 58008,” he said, “my signal with the SEC.”

            He leapt to his feet and wheeled to face the window. He threw open the drapes and stared intently into the smog. “Something’s going down at the regional office,” he said, gravely. “I must be off.”

            He was off, alright. Chelsea took him in for a long moment. Then she looked at her watch. “You’d better go, then, sir,” she said. “I’ll call for your car.”

            She dashed out to her desk. After a moment, she returned with her bag. “Wilshire will be messy this time of day, Calculo. Permission to ride along? I’ve a feeling you may need someone with the power to put on some speed.”

Partners: Part Two

Part One of this story appeared on Feb. 14, 2011.

The day Chelsea turned 40, her co-workers crowded around her cubicle to sing. They even presented her with a cake they’d had decorated to read, “Things only go downhill from her.”

“It’s supposed to say ‘here,’” they explained, glaring at the temp they’d sent to pick up the dessert.

“It’s perfect. I love it,” she said. Then the birthday girl made her wish. It was the same incantation she recited to herself every year. As she prayed this time, however, tears appeared at the corners of her eyes. She’d knocked down but one flame before the screech of the Old Vulture came ringing down the hall.

            “Secretary!”

            Chelsea pushed apologetically through the gathering

“Doors,” Winterstone bellowed, motioning for her to exit and, in so doing, wrestle closed the great mahogany planks.

            She returned to her desk to find her friends had fled. Her cake was running with wax. Chelsea blew out the rest of her candles. She began gathering up the unused plates, napkins and forks.

            That night, with a long holiday weekend stretching empty and vast before her, Chelsea allowed herself to feel what she told herself would only be a few minutes of self pity. She put on some Sarah McLachlan. She pulled a bottle of pinot grigio from the fridge. She plopped herself on the floor and ate every last bite of the cake she’d been given that morning, candle wax and all.

            The pastry turned out to be as prescient as it was delicious. Indeed, hours later, it seemed that things really did only go downhill from her. Even with vision blurred, she could see the wish she’d made that afternoon wasn’t going to come true. The fire trucks weren’t coming. There would be no policeman at her door. Superman was dead.

            She raised her empty bottle. “To you, Mr. Winterstone, you horrible old toad,” she announced. “And me.”

The morning after the long weekend, Chelsea didn’t feel much like flying up any staircases. She was on her way to the elevator when she spied the Old Man’s Wall Street Journal at reception, unclaimed. Odd, she thought. He was in each day just after dawn. The one thing he did himself was to pick up the paper.

            Stranger still, when she got upstairs, Winterstone’s den was dark. Its draperies were drawn.

            She put down her coffee to check her BlackBerry. Nothing. As much as the prospect of the Iron Horse’s taking an unannounced sick day cheered her, she knew such an idea was preposterous. Winterstone hadn’t missed a chance to put in his 12 or 13 hours for decades. In Chelsea’s own tenure with the man, he’d survived three massive heart attacks by simply shouting them into submission and, in each case, been in by breakfast. Yes, this was most puzzling, indeed.

            Just as intriguing was the Journal headline she noticed: “Lightning Storm Pounds Regatta: Leading Financial Figure Struck, Missing.” I hope it was him, she thought, scanning the lead but reading no farther. “A story that lurid seems better suited for the Los Angeles Times,” she said, pleased with herself. Switching from morning zoo radio to NPR for the drive to work was beginning to pay off.

            Chelsea picked up her coffee, tucked the paper beneath her arm and stepped into the void. She was making her way toward the curtains behind her boss’s desk when she was assaulted by the stench of sulfur. No, it was worse than that. What she smelled was the odor of something like burned flesh.

            A figure moved in the inkiness before her. She froze in her tracks. Not a foot from Chelsea’s face, someone or something was breathing. Her hand darted out for Winterstone’s antique desk lamp. To her horror, she found she grasped not the fixture’s chain, but the clammy hand of another.

            Fire roared through her veins. She pulled. By God, she would see her attacker. Suddenly, the suite burst into light and there was the Great Man himself, seated behind his desk in a dollar-green leotard and Mexican wrestler’s mask.

            “Secretary,” he croaked.

            “Holy Christ!” Chelsea cried, leaping into the air. She spun, sent a roundhouse kick across the width of the desk, and landed. The CFO tumbled backward, head over heels. Coffee flew everywhere.

Chelsea scurried back out to her cubicle, returning with fistfuls of napkins. She dropped to her knees and began dabbing madly at the carpet. Winterstone rolled about the floor, making gurgling sounds.

            “Sir!” Chelsea shouted. “My language. I am so sorry.”

            Winterstone fought the chair off his back and struggled to his knees. “Your language? Dear girl,” he said, breath ragged, “you laid your boot to me.”

            “Well, you startled me,” she fired back, as unable to rein in her tongue as she had been her foot. “Why were you sitting in the dark, dressed as a pickle?”

            There came no apology, of course. There never had. He made no answer. Gradually, though, Chelsea became aware of a whimpering. She crawled quietly to the desk and peeked above its edge. Winterstone was seated once again. He had his big, currency-colored head in his hands and was rocking back and forth. He smelled something awful.

            Chelsea ducked back down. This couldn’t be happening. She read her job description daily and was completely sure this, whatever this was, wasn’t in it. She pondered backing out. Even on all fours, she reckoned she could cross the office’s Berber expanse in little more than seconds. The trip downstairs to Human Resources wouldn’t take much longer.